‘Small’ vs. ‘standard’ meal portions
She said it’s promising to see restaurants offering smaller portions, and she’ll watch to see if it actually leads to people not overeating as much.
“Now that they’re calling it lighter portions, are people going to think, ‘Well, I’m not going to be full if I order from a lighter portion?’ Even if the calories are sufficient to fill someone up,” Hua said.
She recently did a field experiment where two cafés introduced smaller versions of existing dishes, as well as the regular size. She said that she found people did buy the smaller and less expensive version when offered, and “just by simply offering a smaller portion, people who purchased that smaller portion had fewer calories in their transaction by basically half.”
Hua also found that the cafés did not lose money by doing this experiment. In fact, sales went up compared to the same time in a previous year when the cafés were not doing this study, though Hua is hesitant to conclude that introducing smaller versions of dishes caused the increase in sales.
She tested another idea in these experiments: Would people be more likely to order the smaller version if the café called it the “standard” version?
But that did not turn out to be the case, despite an earlier online experiment concluding that people would be more likely to order a smaller portion if a menu called it “standard.” So Hua found no benefit to calling the smaller portion “standard” instead of “small.”
She said she would be interested to see how the menus with different portion sizes play out in the real world, since she found that branding “will play a big part as to who will actually order from these types of menus.”
“If people don’t feel like they’re eating less, then that’s an even better win,” she added.